John Lennon Never Thought The Beatles Would Be ‘Stupid’ Enough to Break Up
John Lennon announced he was leaving The Beatles in 1969. Band relations had not been in a good place, and they continued to devolve. Paul McCartney sued the group, and their relationships, which had once been tight, broke down. The vitriol between Lennon and McCartney was particularly potent; Lennon frequently spoke badly about his former bandmate in interviews. He said that he never could have expected the way The Beatles’ split shook out.
John Lennon never thought The Beatles would have an acrimonious split
The Beatles had a notoriously nasty split. While they’ve said that the media blew their fighting out of proportion, they were not happy with one another for several years. Lennon said that in the years before the break up, he would have never predicted how bitter things got.
“I always remember the film with those British people who wrote those silly operas, Gilbert and Sullivan,” he said in The Beatles Anthology. “I remember watching the film with Robert Morley in and thinking, ‘We’ll never get to that.'”
They did, though. Lennon said that even though he was slinging insults at his former bandmates, he found the breakup very sad.
“And we did, which really upset me,” he said. “I really never thought we’d be so stupid, like splitting and arguing. But we were naive enough to let people come between us and that’s what happened. But it was happening anyway.”
Lennon said that the band’s tangled business affairs pushed them apart.
“I don’t mean Yoko, I mean businessmen,” he said. “It’s like when people decide to get a divorce: quite often you decide amicably, but then when you get your lawyers and they say, ‘Don’t talk to the other party unless there’s a lawyer present,’ that’s when the drift really starts happening,”
John Lennon was the one to break up The Beatles
After a period of tension, Lennon told his bandmates he was leaving The Beatles.
“There was a meeting and John walked into it, and the other Beatles and me were in this room and John walked in and said, ‘I’m leaving The Beatles,'” McCartney told NPR. “We were gobsmacked. We were very shocked. I think the first question in our minds was, is this going to last? Or is this just something very John-ish where he would just say, ‘Hey, Big Dramatic Statement!'”
While Ringo Starr and George Harrison had temporarily left at separate points, this felt more final. They did not reunite and never would.
“It was big,” McCartney said. “I think we wondered whether [the band] would get together again, and when it didn’t, it left us all, in one way, without a job, because this had been our job. It was bad news.”
Paul McCartney shared how it became ‘three against one’
The Beatles’ new manager, Allen Klein, was at the center of their fraught business dealings. Lennon, Harrison, and Starr all supported Klein, whereas McCartney wanted nothing to do with him.
“I’d fallen out with the other three at once over the Klein thing,” McCartney said. “I didn’t want him representing me in any way. They had persuaded me that we had to give Klein 20%. The only way they could was that they said, ‘OK, he’ll have 20% on any increases he gets us. If Capitol are giving us that much on royalties and he gets this much, then he’ll have 20% of the difference.'”
McCartney decided to sue the band to keep control over the band’s catalog.
“So it was three against one. Never mind three against one — it was me against the world!” McCartney said. “It was me against three hundred million as long as far as I was concerned. The way I saw it, I had to save the Beatles’ fortune. All we ever earned was in that company — and I wasn’t about to see it go.”
Ultimately, McCartney came out on top. He won in court, and his bandmates later realized they shouldn’t have trusted Klein.
